Juno

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Juno was the queen of the Roman gods: wife and sister of Jupiter, one of the three deities of the Capitoline Triad, and the divine guardian of women across the whole arc of their lives. The Romans worshipped her under a long string of titles, each marking a different office — Lucina, who brought children into the light at birth; Pronuba, who presided over marriage; Regina, the queen enthroned beside Jupiter on the Capitol. By the late Republic she had been thoroughly assimilated to the Greek Hera, and the two were treated as one goddess told in two languages. The sixth month carried her name — Iunius, June — and brides who married in it married under her protection.

The goddess beneath the consort

That assimilation can obscure how distinct her older Roman and Italic profile was. Before the wholesale borrowing of Greek myth, Juno was less the jealous consort of Greek story than a tutelary power: every Roman woman was held to have her own iuno, a guardian spirit answering to the genius that watched over a man. The genius and the iuno were the indwelling vital force of a person, the power by which a household renewed itself across generations — so that the great goddess of the Capitol and the small protective spirit of an ordinary woman bore the same name and were, in some sense, the same thing diffused through the whole female half of the city. Major Italian towns kept their own civic Junos, and Roman religion took the conquest of a city partly as the persuading of its goddess to change sides. Among the great gods of the state she stood beside her brother-husband and the others of the public pantheon — Mars the war-power, Mercury of exchange, the old harvest-king Saturn, Venus of desire, and the twin archers Diana and Apollo — but she alone held the office of the queen, the only one whose sovereignty was a marriage.

Her name has been read by ancient and modern writers alike as belonging to the root that gives Latin iuvenis, “youth,” and aevum, the span of a life — the same Indo-European stem of vital force that surfaces in the English word young. On this reckoning Juno is the power of quickening and renewal itself, the force that brings a thing into its prime. The etymology remains debated, and it runs alongside a second lineage: in the language of the Etruscans, Rome’s nearest and most formidable neighbors, the same queen was called Uni, and the two names are tangled at the root in a way that no one has fully unknotted. The goddess the Romans inherited was already old and already shared, an Italic and Etruscan power before she was a Roman one.

The titles and the offices

To follow Juno through her epithets is to read the whole architecture of her cult, for the Romans did not so much tell stories about her as assign her duties. The scholar Georges Dumézil compressed three of those duties into one inscribed formula, Sospita Mater Regina — the Savior, the Mother, the Queen — and read in it the trace of a goddess who governed war, fertility, and sovereignty at once, the full triple competence of a great divinity.

As Lucina she presided over childbirth, the goddess who brings the newborn into the light. Her temple stood on the Esquiline, on the site of an old sacred grove — the lucus that some took for the source of her name, against the simpler reading that bound her to lux, the light itself. Her festival, the Matronalia, fell on the first of March, the day her temple was dedicated; on it the married women of Rome came to her with their hair unbound and no knots in their clothing, every binding loosened in sympathy with the loosening of a birth, and husbands gave their wives gifts. It was, in effect, the festival of the married woman as such, the counterpart in the calendar to the household iuno that each of those women carried.

As Sospita — “the savior,” the preserver — she belonged to Lanuvium, the Latin town whose cult Rome absorbed when the two cities were joined in shared citizenship in 338 BCE, after which the Roman consuls were bound to sacrifice to her there each year. This was Juno in armor: the cult statue showed her cloaked in a goatskin drawn up over the head, a spear in one hand and a shield on the other, shod in upturned shoes — a martial figure utterly unlike the matron of the Esquiline, and one Cicero singled out to make the point that the same name covered very different gods, the Juno of the Argives, the Juno of Lanuvium, and the Juno of Rome each wearing a different face. Beneath the goatskin lay something older still. The poet Propertius preserved the rite of the Lanuvine serpent: a snake kept in a cave below the sanctuary, to which once a year a girl descended bearing cakes; if she was chaste the serpent took the offering and the year’s harvest was assured, and if she was not, the omen failed. The savior goddess sat atop a chthonic guardian of fertility older than the goat.

As Curitis — also Quiritis, from a Sabine word for the spear — she was again armed, the tutelary power of the curiae, the ancient voting and military divisions of the Roman people, said to be honored by all thirty of them. The spear was hers in a quieter office too: a Roman bride’s hair was parted with a small lance, the caelibataris hasta, a touch of the goddess’s weapon laid on the very threshold of marriage. At Tibur and at Falerii she was worshipped as Regina and Curitis together, her rites there conducted by a male priest, the pontifex sacrarius — a sign of how far her writ ran beyond the women’s quarter into the public business of a whole community.

As Caprotina she was the goddess of the Nonae Caprotinae, the seventh of July, a festival kept by the women and above all the slave-women of Rome beneath a wild fig tree on the Campus Martius. They feasted in the open, fought a mock battle with fig branches, and offered the milky sap of the wild fig — the caprificus, the “goat-fig” — in place of milk. The rite was tied to a memory of the city’s deliverance: a serving-girl who had passed herself off as a freeborn woman among the enemy and then climbed the wild fig to signal the Roman attack with a torch. Fertility, deliverance, and the lowest women of the household met under the same tree.

The queen who changes sides

The most consequential of her titles was Regina, and it carried within it the strangest of Roman habits toward the gods. When the dictator Marcus Furius Camillus besieged the Etruscan city of Veii, twelve miles north of Rome, he did not only assault its walls; he addressed its goddess. Veii had its own Juno Regina, its Uni, the queen who guarded the place, and Camillus performed the evocatio — the “calling out” — promising her a finer house and a fuller worship in Rome if she would abandon her city. When Veii fell in 396 BCE her wooden image was carried to Rome and set in a new temple on the Aventine, dedicated on the first of September, and the goddess who had defended the enemy became a Roman goddess. The episode is the earliest evocatio Roman memory recorded, and it lays bare the logic underneath the conquest: a city could not be wholly taken while its tutelary power still stood with it, and so the power had first to be persuaded across. Juno Regina later received a second temple in the Circus Flaminius, vowed by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and dedicated in 179 BCE, and her cult became one of the great public devotions of the matrons of Rome, who on occasions of crisis carried offerings to her in solemn procession.

Moneta, the warner

One title carried an afterlife far beyond the cult. On the Arx, the citadel of the Capitoline, stood the temple of Juno Moneta — “the warner,” from the Latin monere, to warn or remind. Two explanations of the name circulated. By one, geese sacred to her roused the garrison: when the Gauls who had taken Rome attempted a night assault up the Capitoline cliff in 390 BCE, the temple geese heard them and raised the alarm in time for Marcus Manlius to throw the climbers back. By another, recorded by Cicero, a voice once issued from the temple in an earthquake, warning that a pregnant sow be sacrificed in expiation. The temple itself was vowed by Lucius Furius Camillus during a war against the Aurunci and dedicated in 344 BCE. Beside it, the Roman mint did its work — the place where the city’s bronze and silver were struck — and the goddess’s title attached first to the building, then to the coin it produced. From Moneta descend, by that chain, the English words mint, the place of coining, and money, the thing coined. The everyday word for currency reaches back through a Roman goddess who began as a warner of cities and ended as the namesake of the till.

The imperial Juno

In the cult of the Roman empire Juno was bound to the emperor’s house. As Jupiter was the heavenly pattern of the emperor, so Juno Regina was the pattern of the empress, and the women of the imperial family were honored under her name and in her image. The link held to the very end of a reign: when an empress died and was declared Diva, raised among the gods, the coinage that proclaimed her consecration often showed her borne upward on the back of a peacock — Juno’s own bird carrying the dead woman to heaven as the eagle carried the emperor. The peacock had become the vehicle of a woman’s apotheosis, the queen of the gods lending her creature to the deification of mortal queens.

The air and the allegory

Long before the empire fell, Greek and Roman writers had read Hera-Juno allegorically — as the air, as the female principle of generation, as matter ordered by the power of the sky. The reading was old and partly a play on the name: in Plato’s Cratylus Socrates hears in Hera a near-anagram of aēr, the air, and the conceit ran on through Plutarch and into the Latin commentators. By that scheme Juno was the lower, moist, generative air wedded to Jupiter’s bright upper sky and fire — the receptive to his active, the female element of the cosmos through which his power worked itself into bodies. The grammarian Servius, glossing Virgil, and the encyclopedist Macrobius carried the equation forward, and it became one of the standard keys by which the old gods could be kept in service as figures for the forces of nature after their altars had cooled — the same impulse by which astrology had bound the gods’ names to the planets and held each to govern a portion of the world.

That allegorical habit passed, through the late-antique commentators and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, into the mythographic handbooks of the Renaissance, the same learned world in which Renaissance Hermetism recovered the old gods as bearers of hidden meaning. These were working reference books for poets and painters — Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, Vincenzo Cartari’s illustrated Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi (Venice, 1556), and above all Natale Conti’s Mythologiae (Venice, 1567), the most consulted of them all — and they transmitted Juno to European art and letters less as an object of worship than as a figure to be decoded. Her attributes hardened into a vocabulary. The peacock, whose tail the goddess had strewn with the hundred eyes of the slain watchman Argus after Mercury killed him, marked her as the queen and the watcher; the diadem marked her sovereignty; the pomegranate her marriages and her fertility; the chariot drawn by peacocks her queenly passage through the air she was said to be. A painter who set those signs around a regal woman was writing her name in symbols, and a reader trained on Cartari and Conti could read it. The same scheme that had once turned the goddess into the cosmic air now turned her into a code on a canvas.

Texts and scholarship

Juno is reconstructed from sources none of which set out to describe her system. The poets supply the figure and the festivals: Ovid’s Fasti, the calendar-poem that explains the Roman year month by month, debates the very origin of June — whether it honors Juno or the iuniores, the younger men — and describes the Matronalia and the Nonae Caprotinae; Propertius preserves the Lanuvine serpent; Virgil’s Aeneid gives the literary Juno her great wrath against the Trojans. The historian Livy records the evocatio of Juno Regina from Veii and the geese of the Capitol; Cicero, in the De Natura Deorum, sets the Juno of Lanuvium against the Juno of Rome and so registers, from inside the religion, how many goddesses the one name held.

The standard modern treatment of the Roman cult, against which her offices are read here, is Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), a two-volume history and sourcebook that sets Juno among the public gods of the Republic and the imperial state. The topography of her temples — the Aventine and Circus Flaminius shrines of Juno Regina, the Esquiline temple of Lucina, the Moneta temple on the Arx — is laid out in the classic gazetteer of Samuel Ball Platner, completed by Thomas Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), readable in full through the University of Chicago’s LacusCurtius (penelope.uchicago.edu). A compact, citation-dense conspectus of the etymology, the Etruscan Uni, and the full range of cult titles — Sospita, Curitis, Caprotina, Moneta, Lucina, Regina — is gathered in the reference article on the goddess (Wikipedia, “Juno (mythology)”), which collects the ancient testimonia town by town.

The allegorical afterlife has its own scholarship. The seed of it, the reading of the name as the air, is in Plato’s Cratylus, available in Benjamin Jowett’s public-domain translation (Cratylus). Its Renaissance flowering — the handbooks through which the decoded Juno reached the painters — is treated in the first complete English edition of the chief one of them, John Mulryan and Steven Brown’s translation of Natale Conti’s Mythologiae (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), reviewed in detail in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (bmcr.brynmawr.edu). Cartari’s Imagini, the picture-book that gave the symbols their visual form, survives in the early editions digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (gallica.bnf.fr).

Through every one of these offices the same gesture repeats. The bride’s hair is parted with the spear; the matron unbinds her hair at the Matronalia so that nothing in the house is knotted while a child is born; the enemy goddess is called out of her walls and given a better temple; the slave-women feast under the wild fig and the consuls ride to Lanuvium to sacrifice. Juno is the power that presides over a passage and sees it safely through — birth, marriage, the turning of a conquered city, the renewal of the year — and the Romans kept her not as a story to be told but as a custody to be observed, the queen whose business was that the threshold be crossed and the line continue.

→ In the library: Plato — Cratylus (Jowett)

→ Related: Jupiter · Hera · Mercury · Mars · Saturn · Venus · Diana · Apollo · Roman Empire · Astrology · Renaissance Hermetism